"We're back to a real rising tide of secrecy," said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which last year helped expose a federal program to make secret millions of records once available to the public.

Blanton spoke Saturday at the Freedom of Information Summit in Seattle, where more than 100 open-government advocates discussed subjects ranging from John Lennon to myths about identity theft, said the Seattle Times.

An example of absurd government secrecy, Blanton said, involved a CIA report on terrorism that described a "Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge" planning to "sabotage the annual courier flight of the Government of the North Pole" imperiling "Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus."

A government-watchdog group obtained the report from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.

When it asked the CIA for the same report, it received the document entirely blacked out, apparently, in order to protect national security, the newspaper reported.